If you called a Native American "Redbone" at the Thanksgiving table, you might get a drumstick upside the head. But in the late 1960s, when American Indians were reclaiming cultural pride alongside other minorities, two brothers sharing Cherokee, Apache and Shoshone blood defiantly took the term Redbone for the name of their band.

The brothers already had a fairly impressive résumé in the music business by the time they decided to make their heritage an asset. Born Pat and Lolly Vasquez in Fresno, Calif., they adopted the last name Vegas to downplay their birth name's Latino roots.

Pat and Lolly were proficient from a young age on bass and guitar, respectively, accompanying pianist Oscar Peterson at the Monterey Jazz Festival before heading to southern California in the early '60s to cash in on the surf-music craze. As the Avantis, the Vegas boys recorded several surf instrumentals, working in the studio with then-unknown session musicians including Glen Campbell and Leon Russell. Regulars at the Haunted House in Hollywood, which featured a stage designed to look like a monster's mouth, Pat and Lolly joined the house band on ABC's teen pop variety show 'Shindig' and bagged a cameo in the teensploitation movie 'It's a Bikini World' alongside the Animals and Bobby "Boris" Pickett.

Lady GaGa is going to perform for the Queen in London. We weren't aware that she was a fan. [Angry Ape]

Check out NPR's 'Most Important' records of the decade list. [NPR]

Rosanne Cash sits down for an intimate performance in the KCRW studio. [KCRW]

John Mayer and pint-sized pop star Justin Beiber are currently engaged in the artist beef of the century. [Idolator]

Hmm ... the Black Eyed Peas' 'Party All the Time' sounds awfully familiar. Adam Freeland agrees. [Prefix]

Any album with a title that openly mocks President Obama needs a cover that's equally subversive, and Jello Biafra's artwork for 'The Audacity of Hype' certainly delivers. The former Dead Kennedys frontman opted for a version of Shepard Fairey's famous "HOPE" picture and replace Obama's image with a demonic version of himself, fangs and horns included.

Rather than just get an artist to spoof the picture like so many others have done, Biafra went to Fairey himself. "We've known each other for years, at least by phone and being fans of each other's work. He'd done another album cover for me after the Seattle protests," Biafra tells Spinner, referring to a show he did with the No WTO Combo with Nirvana's Krist Novoselic and Soundgarden's Kim Thayil. "I'd seen a variation of Shepard's hand about to strangle the Earth on the cover of one of Seattle's weekly magazines and thought 'This is perfect.' The in-house Art Director of [Biafra's record label] Alternative Tentacles put me in touch with Shepard, so we tweaked the picture to get it ready for the album cover and we went on from there."

Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas is currently "camping out" in Los Angeles. As part of his excursion, he's doing a month-long residency of shows, playing every Friday at the Broadway Palace Theater. It turns out there's a lot of history at the venue. "I don't think there's ever been a rock show in that place," Casablancas tells Spinner. "It's where 'Thriller' was filmed and it's just a rad place, to be honest. It feels super-grand and kind of dilapidated, but in a charming way. [It's] super-intimate so even the worst seat you can see my expression."

When Casablancas chose the venue, he admits he wasn't aware of the historical significance, as it's the venue where Michael Jackson and his date are watching the movie. The venue even recently recreated the clip's marquee to honor the late pop icon. "I didn't know about it at first and I only found out after I started to fight for it," he says. But it was definitely an added bonus for him. "It's just the vibe is so great and as we're kind of debating, they were like, 'Oh, that's also where 'Thriller' was filmed,'" he recalls. "I was like, 'You're not arguing your case for not doing a show here.' The place feels special already and that definitely doesn't demystify it."

Jack Penate is your token rock fan-turned-star. "I fought for about an hour over Chris Martin's guitar way back when Coldplay first started. He threw it in the crowd and I didn't get it," Penate tells Spinner during a recent Interface taping in our Los Angeles studios. He also got handpicked from the audience to dance onstage with Missy Elliot. "I was really obsessed with her first record," he says. "I wasn't the normal Missy Elliot looking fan, and I think she liked that, so she brought me on stage. I was like 16 or something -- at that point I was break dancing and all that kind of things that you do. I just danced and took photos of me and her cuddling."

These fan encounters eventually led to Penate's 2007 debut 'Matinee,' which reached No. 1 on the UK's indie rock chart. For his part, Penate created his own signature sound that sonically blends rockabilly, reggae and tropi-Cali all into one.

Actor/director Zach Braff gave Grammy-nominated English pop star Imogen Heap plenty of exposure in America when he used 'Let Go,' a former Frou Frou song, in his break-out film 'Garden State,' so she thought she might return the favor. "I wrote the song 'Wait It Out' for this Zach Braff film called 'Open Hearts,'" she tells Spinner. "I read the script on the way to Hawaii to write songs for 'Ellipse' and I loved it. I wrote this song for him helping me get the first one started in 'Garden State' but the film 'Open Hearts' fell through. He wrote me an e-mail recently asking me to write songs in another film ['Swingles'] for the character played by Cameron Diaz but I haven't read the script yet."

Heap is also very generous when it comes to lending her voice to charitable causes. She participated in the album 'Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace,' an initiative to support the human rights effort in Tibet. Her latest pet project is a dream charity event that involves her fans and what they believe in. "I have this grand plan for the next tour I do in April, which is to go to each city and create some kind of platform for people to enter information on this computer screen at the venue on how they want me to improvise a song," she says. "I have to improvise a song on the theme of what they want." Once the song is written, she'll record it and put it on iTunes. "When people buy it the proceeds go to the charity that is particular to that city," she says.

The young John Lydon was so brilliant, author Greil Marcus argued Thursday night during a presentation at Columbia University, that the iconic Sex Pistols singer, now 53, should be forgiven for appearing in British butter commercials.

"I think John Lydon did so much to make the world a richer, more abstract, more contingent place -- and did more to raise the stakes of what people see as art -- that I don't care what he does to make a buck," Marcus said. "I think he deserves every penny."

Marcus' absolution of Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, came after the writer -- one of the most intelligent rock critics of all time -- gave a dramatic reading of the play he wrote as a precursor to 'Lipstick Traces,' the book whose 20th anniversary he was on hand to commemorate.